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Hacking Awesomeness in Baltimore

Tropo was in Charm City this weekend for the first Baltimore Hackathon, which took place at Beehive Baltimore – a co-working space in Baltimore’s Canton neighborhood.

This thoroughly awesome location was the appropriate setting for a get together of hardware and software hackers from around the Baltimore area to come together and bang out great ideas over the weekend.

As hackathons go, it was a really special event.

Not only was it the first hackathon in Baltimore, but it was somewhat unique in that it focused on both software development and hardware hacking as well. All of the developers in attendance were smart, passionate technologists; the location along Baltimore’s harbor was outstanding; the event was organized exceptionally well and ran smoothly; the food was great; even the beer was good.

Tropo was on hand as a sponsor of the event and also to lend a hand to developers that wanted to add phone, voice or SMS awesomeness to their apps. Tropo’s APIs were used in some really impressive projects during the event.

For example Brent Frederick of Baltimore built what he refers to as VoiceBump – an app that lets people call a phone number and create a blog post with Tropo’s recording and transcription services.

Another app – Call the Door by Mike Brenner – uses Tropo’s SMS service to unlock the door at the building where the event was held (locked doors can turn into something of a hindrance when your coding all night).

Tropo also provided a special award at the event – giving a prize to the devleoper of the app with the best use of our services. An update with the name of the winner (or winners) and a description of the project will be posted in the next day or two.

In the interim, here are some pictures from the event.

Update: all of the winners from the Baltimore Hackathon are now listed on the Startup Baltimore site. Congratulations to all the winners!